Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity

"Archaeologies of the Modern" invites a double explanation: first, of a title that associates the modern(ist) scene with the excavation of apparently fragmentary pasts; second, of the issue's unconventional format. The issue is dialogical in structure and provocative in intent. It conjoins essays authored by cultural historians and by archaeologists, and accompanies each contribution by an archaeologist with a brief response from a cultural historian, and vice versa. The aim of this device, as well as of the special issue as a whole, is to inaugurate a dialogue between reflections on archaeology as a modern discipline and inquiries into the archaeological imagination in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural forms. We believe that this dialogue transgresses the limits of conventional interdisciplinarity because it excavates forms in the cultural imaginary that find a home in no orthodox disciplinary field.